History of Computing

The first computers were actually people - computer was the term used for people
whose job it was to perform scientific calculations rapidly and accurately.

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)

Alan Turing was one of the founders of Computer
Science.
He developed an
abstract model of a computer called a Turing machine before there actually were
physical computers. A Turing machine is theoretically capable of doing any
calculation that today's supercomputers can. Although he was British, he
introduced his abstract model in 1936 at Princeton University.

One of the most important things Alan Turing did was work during WW2 to break
the German coding machine called the Enigma. The Germans were very efficient in
their fighting because they could send encoded radio messages that no one else
could decipher all over the world. Alan Turing and a team of mathematicians were
eventually able to decipher the messages which led to the end of WW2.

The highest prize in the field of Computer Science is named the Turing award
after Alan Turing. It is awarded by the ACM, Association for Computing
Machinery.

ENIAC

The ENIAC - Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer - was the first usable
electronic computer. It was completed in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical
Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The computer took up a whole
room and consisted of many cabinents of vacuum tubes - two years later
tranistors were invented and eventually used instead of vacuum tubes.

The funding for the development of the ENIAC was obtained during WW2 as
a means to calculate ballistic tables for the trajectory of projectiles when
the war moved into North Africa where the terrain was much different than
Europe and the old tables weren't valid. By the time the ENIAC was operational,
WW2 had ended. The ENIAC was eventually used for peaceful purposes like the
tabulation of U.S. Census Data.

John Von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

All of the instructions that made the ENIAC work were hard-wired. Each time a
new sequence of instructions (that is, a program) was needed, the machine was rewired.
A Hungarian scientist by the name of John Von Neumann came up with the idea of storing the program in the
computer itself. His early work was also done at Princeton in the 1940's. The
stored-program machine architecture carries his name.
Almost all computers in use today are based on the von
Neumann model of stored programs and use an architecture that he helped develop
in the early years of computing. John Von Neumann also helped develop the atomic bomb as part of the
Manhatten project.

Grace Hopper (1906 - 1992)

The first computer bug was a real bug - a moth caught in a relay switch in the
Mark II, a huge electomechanical computer at Harvard Univiersity in 1947.
That is where the term "debugging"
a program comes from. Grace Hopper is credited with the first documented computer bug.
She also devoped the first compiler, while working at Remington in
1952.

Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852)

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron and worked with
Charles Babbage on his mechanical computing machines called the Difference
Engine and Analytical Engine. She is considered by some people to be the
world's first programmer and the programming language developed by the U.S.
Department of Defense was named Ada in her honor.

Commercial Computers

The first commercial computers developed in the 1950's were called mainframes
and were large and very expensive.
IBM was the primary manufacturer of mainframe computers in the 1960's and 70's.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) came out with the first mini-computer called the
PDP-8 in 1965. The PDP 11/34
and PDP 11/70 were 16 bit machines. In 1978, the first 32-bit
minicomputer was developed by DEC and called the VAX.
Now Nintendo makes the N64,
a 64-bit machine!

Nintendo History:

NES (1985) - 8-Bit CPU

SNES (1991) - 16-Bit CPU

N64 (????) - 64-Bit CPU

Game Cube (2001) - Custom IBM Power PC

In 1978, Ted Hoff, at Intel Corporation, was working on a chip for a
manufacturer of electronic calculators. He realized that it would be a better
idea to develop a general-purpose chip that could be programmed rather than do
a custom design for each calculator. This was the birth of the microprocessor
which was used in micro-computers. One of the earliest micro-computers was
built in the garage of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. This was the beginning of
Apple Corporation.
The first Apple computer did not even have lowercase letters so it could not be
used for word processing. The first big application to run on the Apple was
VisiCalc which was a spreadsheet program.

Later IBM introduced its Personal Computer which is where the name PC comes
from.
IBM did not provide an operating system for its PC's. Bill Gates, CEO of
Microsoft Corp. and the richest person in the U.S., developed a simple
operating system named DOS (Disk Operating Systems) for IBM's PC's.

The Internet

The beginning of the internet was something called the ARPAnet, a network of
computers at universities that was funded by the Advanced Research Planning
Agency of the U.S. Dept. of Defense. It allowed a researcher at one institution
to use a computer at a different institution to execute programs. However, the
network quickly became used for electronic mail or email. Much of the work on
the internet was done at Berkeley in the early 70's. In the 90's the internet
went public. A student at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen, released
a browser for HTTP (HyperText Protocol) to navigate the internet.
The Browser was named Mosaic. It was the forerunner of Netscape.

High Level Languages

Programmers have been using High Level Languages (HLLs) for many years to make
programming easier. The type of programming that was done was generally
"procedural". Around 1985, a Bell Labs employee invented a special high level
language that was "object-oriented". The inventor was Bjarne Stroustrup and the
language was called C++.
Bjarne Stroustrup was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award for fundamental
contributions made to computer science by work done before the age of 30.

Java

The Java language was developed at Sun Microsystems by James Gosling. He
originally called the language Oak after an oak tree that was outside his office
at Sun. It was later discovered that there was already a programming language
called Oak. When a group of Sun people visited a local coffee place, the name
Java was suggested and it stuck. Java was originally developed for programming
intelligent consumer electronic devices. But it was discovered that Java could
be used to write programs called applets that could be used by web developers to
provide animation and interaction on web pages. Java was announced as a
programming language in 1995.